Thursday, April 24, 2008

Wipe Recovery

Moving off the topic of my performance, spending a week with that guild definitely exposed me to some new (to me) ideas and concepts.

One interesting thing is that Reclaimed never used wipe recovery tools. After a wipe, the entire raid always released and ran back. This is in stark contrast to all the other guilds I have ever been. We almost always soulstoned a priest or paladin, and then relied on the healers to resurrect the raid, unless you couldn't recover from the fight.

Running back appears slower at first glance, but is it really? It takes 70 seconds to fully resurrect a raid under perfect conditions. And usually conditions are not perfect. Resurrections will overlap or you'll have to hunt down someone's body. Running probably doesn't take that much longer.

Additionly, people often decide to go AFK after a wipe (post-res if you're lucky, pre-res if you're not). Everyone running keeps everyone at their computer, actually doing something. You don't have to waste time waiting for everyone to get back after from being AFK.

Finally, always running means you are expected to use your Soulstones and Ankhs in battle, which can make a real difference. Getting a mage to return from the dead can be a life-saver, and turn a potential wipe into a victory.

It's probably a small thing, but it's just something that none of my previous guilds did, and maybe a tactic that a lot of smaller/lower level guilds have not considered.

27 comments:

Shalkis, there are a few fights in MH and BT (maybe SWP, I haven't been there though) that require all out DPS. Azgalor in MH and Reliquary in BT are examples. My guild is working on RoS and the strat for phase three is to actually SS locks and mages for phase 3.

..and why would locks and mages need those soulstones in RoS? If you have 25 people with average gear and nature resistance potions alive when phase 3 starts, you should get a kill easily.

If you have people tanking RoS too long in phase 1 or people oneshotting themselves during phase 2, I can imagine that you have DPS issues in phase 3. However, those DPS issues are not the cause, just the effect. Treat the cause, and the effect vanishes.

The rule of thumb for all DPS: If you receive lethal damage, you're doing something wrong.

Or your healers are slacking (coming from a resto druid, before I get flamed ;-)

Anyway we never soulstone anyway either as a wipe recovery tool. We used to back in the day at SSC simply because the CR was sooo frickin' annoying but with the new GY right next to the instance I doubt we would as well. You die and there aren't any rebirths left? Release and run back. If everyone does it, you usually half a good portion of the raid group back at the instance portal already by the time the last person dies. Run in, pick up the last few people who managed to survive longer and get going again.

It really depends on the boss you are wiping on. For example, if you wipe on Illidari Council, release and run will take much more time then beeing resurrected, just because of the long distance you have to run. Of course there are many encounters where it is much faster for everyone just to run in, for example everything in MH. I would say it is faster to run for most bosses in BT too, with the exception of Gorefiend, Council and maybe Akama (but you usually wont wipe there).With the ability to get teleportet into parts of the dungeon by a NPC, wipe recovery tools have become less important, that's for sure.

There is one important exception tho, Kalecgos in Sunwell Plateau. It's a common practice NOT to do the respawn again, because its just very annoying and time consuming. So you have to make sure everyone dies where they can be resurrected and you use all wipe recovery tools to get more tries on the dragon. If you have a 4 hour raid and fail to recover after the respawn happened, you usually have to call the night because the time needed to do it again just wont be enough to do more tries on the boss.

I can understand soulstoning/combat ressing healers and even tanks in fights with threat resets, but.. mages?-)

Heh, I had in mind an SSC run I did with Valarin after the trial. We were on Lurker, and I had a Soulstone, so I stoned the mage on my island. Sure enough, he died to an add (I think he drank a potion at the wrong time, and a big naga ported to him), but he popped right back, up, kept sheeping, and we finished the fight smoothly.

That's why I used mage as my example. That fight was fresh in my mind. I really meant "any class who is important to the particular fight and who has a chance of dying."

Or your healers are slacking (coming from a resto druid, before I get flamed ;-)..which is why I said lethal damage. I play a mage as my main. ;-)

95% of the time the damage is avoidable, and you should not rely on getting healed/ressed. As important as DPSers are in some encounters, they're still less important than the tank. DPS classes who know how to play won't force their healers to choose between them and the tank.

Soulstones are very useful in RoS because the damage tic aura resets when you die (it starts back at 200 no matter how high it was). Its an excellent rule of thumb to SS the glass cannon players when you're learning the fight so they can die and res and take little extra damage.

We also put SS's on the mages on Bloodboil because they will be dying if they take a fel rage. Its easier just to let them die and have the MT Shield Wall then res (and get back to their dance rotation) than to attempt to keep them up.

Regardless, there are only a few fights we use wipe recovery as wipe recovery. Blizzard was kind enough to include ports further into instances in all of the T6/6.5 raids, so running back isn't a huge concern. The only two we have to use wipe recovery on are Eredar Twins in SWP and Council in BT. Everything else is used either in combat (ankhs and Brezes) or as a method to save some repair bills (DI).

Ice Armor actually makes almost no difference, as Thunderclap should be already reducing his attack speed by 20% (the two do not stack). Can mages survive Fel Rage? Sure. Is it worth putting 90% of your healers on them spamming max rank heals to keep them up? Not especially.

Don't take it as a personal attack, your class just has terrible survivability.

Ice Armor actually makes almost no difference, as Thunderclap should be already reducing his attack speed by 20% (the two do not stack).Thunderclap lasts for 30 seconds. Fel Rage lasts for 30 seconds. Unless your tank follows Gurtogg, it won't be up all the time. And that 5% difference translates directly to 5% reduction in incoming DPS.Don't take it as a personal attack, your class just has terrible survivability.We may have the weakest defenses and lowest HP, but we have skills and talents designed to avoid the damage in the first place. For example, Ice Block. If your strategy for Gurtogg includes not healing mages, why not tell them to Ice Block when Fel Rage starts? Having them die just wastes some buffs, including Amplify Magic, Prayer of Fortitude, BoK and Gift of the Wild. The lack of those makes it even harder to keep the mage(s) up during Bloodboils.

Ice Block is used by our soaking mages to remove multiple Bloodboils. I have no idea how you do it, but we have pallys and mages eat multiple debuffs then bubble/block it off.

Buffs can be easily recast in combat. Not an argument.

And do you not have a token Arms warrior with improved TC keeping it up so your tanks don't have to? And [i]technically[/i] that 5% more reduction is not a 5% damage decrease; its only a decrease on his melee swings (which are fast enough that 5% really doesn't matter), not fel breath, cleave, or any of his other instants.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think Dazanna means don't heal the mages at all, he means don't put extra healers on the Fel Rage target (above what the other classes need) to ensure the mage's survival. If the mage survives, that's great, but it's not really expected.

Basically, his strat is playing the odds that a mage won't be targetted, and using a Soulstone to compensate for being unlucky.

We use 3 groups of 5 people each to soak the Bloodboil. With that rotation, there is no need for anyone to take more than 1 Bloodboil at a time. This way we can save our Ice Blocks, bubbles, soulstones, battle resses and ankhs for real emergencies. Waste them early.. and you may have nothing left when you really need 'em.

My point is: If you pull your own weight, you increase the margin of error your raid can afford. If everyone in the raid pulls their own weight, you can recover from many situations which would have otherwise ended in a wipe.

And yes, we do have a Fury/Arms warrior with Imp. TC. However, he doesn't need to babysit the Fel Raged mage and can do a lot of threat-free DPS instead.

The normal Arms PvE rotation is:Swing/Slam/MS---Swing/Slam/WW---Swing/Slam/MS---Swing/Slam/BreakIn that break both MS and WW are on cooldown and the Arms Warrior can easily throw in a Thunderclap. It doesn't gimp his DPS in the slightest. There is no other ability for him to be using in that break, so why not do something useful? Just so you know, my alt is a PvE Arms Warrior so I happen to know the class role quite well.

It is exactly as Rohan says. With your beasty 1500 armor it is incredibly difficult to keep a mage up without assigning extra healers. We still have our 4 assigned Fel Rage healers spam on him, but chances are a mage will die on the fight, not by any fault of his own. Its much safer for everyone to just SS the mage in the likely event that he dies than to put other people's lives in jeopardy by taking raid and MT healers away from their assignments to attempt to keep one incredibly squishy player up.

You do know, that you get your armour increased by 15,000 if you are the target of Fel Rage, right? So your 1,500 or 2,200 "normal" armour doesnt make very much of a difference any more.Anyway, there are different strategies to keep even your glass mages alive during Fel Rage.

First - tell your mages NOT to cast anything with cast time while beeing Fel Raged. They can spam Arcane Explosion if they really want to DPS. If you cast, you can not Dodge/Parry (correct me if i am wrong) which really sucks for the breakable Mages.

Next, have your Tanks intercept the mage in "low HP, MS debuff applied" situations. They have to watch out not to intercept into an Arcing Smash/Acid Breath combo and only do it, if they have full HP themselves.

But even if all this is done, there can be "bad luck" situations where your mage just dies. I guess you could SS the mage to be on the safe side, we usually just give them a Battle Rez if it happens. You can also down Gurtogg if your 2-3 Mages are dead because of Fel Rage, thats not a Big Deal if you can adjust your Bloodboil soaking groups on the fly ;)

We had them "bad luck" situations also with Warlocks or Priests, so i would not explicitly say Mages are the ones bound to die during Fel Rage, if your Healers are not totally slacking.

But since there isn't anything else really useful to do with the soulstones, i would say go for it and SS your mage on Bloodboil, it's almost for free anyway :)

You do know, that you get your armour increased by 15,000 if you are the target of Fel Rage, right?I do, but that's beside the point. A properly played mage is not significantly squishier than that holy priest. Squishy mages are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you can't be bothered to use the skills and talents that you do have, you're going to die more often. To compensate, your raid needs to use their emergency skills to compensate, which reduces the affordable margin of error. If you have to soulstone a mage, then you aren't soulstoning an another healer. If you're using a Shield Wall to survive the mage's Fel Rage, then you might not have Shield Wall ready for a moment when you really need it. Ditto with Ice Block. If your rotation requires mages to take two Bloodboils, then you won't have an Ice Block ready if you run out of soakers and the mage needs to take two Bloodboils.

It all adds up. If your raiders aren't bothered to use the skills at their disposal, the encounters will be harder than they should be.

And contrary to your belief, Holy Priests have about double the armor of a Mage thanks to Inner Fire, along with PW:S and PoM to keep themselves up. Warlocks have the same armor but can easily drain tank. Everyone else is in Leather or better.

You are the squishiest class. Get over it. Its nothing against you at all, but pretending that you're a leet Ice Armor tank is pure folly.

Relying on Ice Block, DS and Shield Wall to save you is, IMO, wrong. You shouldn't ever have to use those abilities to save yourself, and if you did it means someone fucked up. Execution is 90% of raiding, and instead of relying on "oh shit" buttons to make up for your mistakes you should work on correcting those mistakes so you never have to touch those buttons. Do you have your Mages Ice Block out of Barrage on Illidan or do you have them save it just so that they can use it on flames?

Its only because blizzard has been nice on graveyards and respawn rates that a policy of no wipe recovery is viable. If you had suggested it back in MC days with 30 minute respawn on pats, people would have laughed in your face.

Our 1st two kills of VR close on a year ago were both with trash respawned and past the time we would have cleared the trash again.

Relying on Ice Block, DS and Shield Wall to save you is, IMO, wrong. You shouldn't ever have to use those abilities to save yourself, and if you did it means someone fucked up.Indeed. Like relying on Soulstones and Shield Walls when a mage gets Fel Rage. In this case, at least two people fucked up. The mage who wouldn't lift a finger to boost his own survivability, and the healer who doesn't bother to heal him.

If you agreed with me, why didn't you say so? We could have saved a lot of time.

We still heal our Mages with the same number of assigned healers as every other class gets. We just aren't surprised when they die and are prepared for it. You seem to take this as a personal insult for some stupid reason.

Shalkis, read what I say before you make another stupid remark.Could you then point out exactly where you and I disagree about the usage of emergency button skills? I say that one shouldn't rely on them, and you say that one shouldn't rely on them. Where's the difference?

However, what I am pointing out is that in my experience, mage mortality at Gurtogg is not an issue that requires the use of emergency buttons any more than in any other encounter. You disagree. But since we're playing using the same ruleset, there must be differences in what we do in that encounter. I tried pointing out potential causes, but you seem to take it as a personal insult.

"The mage who wouldn't lift a finger to boost his own survivability, and the healer who doesn't bother to heal him."

I have said numerous times we have all our normal healers on the mage. The only difference is that he gets no special treatment: he gets 4 healers and if he can't live with that than c'est la vie. Our other 3-4 healers have better things to be doing. We have a Warrior who keeps Thunderclap on Bloodboil the entire time, so Ice Armor is worth much less than Molten Armor.

All we do is take precautions. We assume the worst and SS the mage every time. Its not like we're using the SS for anything else, so why wouldn't you do it?

I have said numerous times we have all our normal healers on the mage. The only difference is that he gets no special treatment: he gets 4 healers and if he can't live with that than c'est la vie.Emphasis mine. It's a team effort. If you slack off as a mage, you'll probably fail. If your healers slack off, you'll probably fail. If both slack off, you will fail.

so Ice Armor is worth much less than Molten Armor.Ah, but like you yourself have pointed out, it is possible to cast buffs in combat. You are free to use Molten Armor to DPS and Ice Armor to survive the Fel Rage. It is also permitted to use the other skills at your disposal as well. Such as proper gearing, Amplify Magic, Mana Shield, Healthstone from your friendly neighbourhood warlock, health potions..

Saying that you're the squishiest class is not an excuse to die. It just means that you have to make an effort to not be the weakest link.